The Essential Ned Rorem

September 21, 2003|Lawrence A. Johnson

Ned Rorem is as renowned for his literary endeavors as his music. Below is a sampling of the essential Rorem to be found on disc and in print.

Music

Evidence of Things Not Seen. The New York Festival of Song (New World, two discs). Rorem's most ambitious and possibly greatest achievement, this deeply moving, valedictory cycle sets texts by some of the composer's favorite writers, including Whitman, Auden, Langston Hughes and Paul Goodman. There is a clear feeling of summing up and drawing the threads together in this 90-minute work, with 36 songs that explore themes of spiritual longing, nostalgia, death and love in all its joys and sorrows.

Songs. Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano; Malcolm Martineau, pianist (Erato). Songs. Carole Farley, soprano; Ned Rorem, pianist (Naxos). It is in the realm of art song that Rorem's elegant style is at its most personal and communicative. Susan Graham's rich voice is unfailingly expressive and sensitive to Rorem's settings. Carole Farley is less refined and strident at times, but her gutsy performances benefit from having the composer at the keyboard.

Symphonies Nos. 1-3. JosM-i Serebrier, conductor; Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (Naxos). This recent disc offers overdue premiere recordings of Rorem's first two symphonies with the better-known Third, and the two earlier works are real discoveries. There is a 1950s Americana feel in this music with its lean melancholy and some deft French elements, spiced by surprisingly boisterous finales.

Winter Pages. Bright Music. Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival (New World). End of Summer. Book of Hours. Bright Music. The Fibonacci Sequence (Naxos). These complementary discs both offer the scintillating Bright Music as well as other finely crafted chamber works that alternate the playful and melancholy.

Books

The Paris Diary (Da Capo Press). Lucid, scathingly honest views of his contemporaries, and notes on Rorem's bohemian life and loves in 1950s Paris. One of the wittiest and most candid of 20th-century memoirs, the first of Rorem's five diary volumes, is reprinted with its equally absorbing successor, The New York Diary.

A Ned Rorem Reader (Yale University Press). Among the well-chosen riches in the Reader are essays on the composing craft and gracious yet sharp-eyed portraits of colleagues such as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein.